Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Consumerpedia is Wikipedia for products. It's in .00000001 alpha, the site says, but it seems usable, albeit empty. (I put in a review of Thinkpad X40, just to try it out.) The Help page highlights its tools for constructing a hierchical folksonomy: Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link). It explicitly has avoided creating a top-down categorization scheme.Who's up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System (UNSPSC) Deathmatch!

How is it different from ePinions? From the About page:

Consumerpedia came out of a desire to have a user-driven consumer resource that evolved based on how people actually used it - where they were not forced into certain narrow categories and topics as an appendage of someone's ecommerce effort, but rather a completely independent information resource that was an end in itself - one that had no conflict of interest and with the sole goal of simply making it easier to find and share helpful information

I don't yet see how it accommodates multiple points of view, as the About page promises, but I'm sure that'll be clear once someone posts a multiple point of view. [Technorati tags: taxonomy consumerpedia wikipedia]

Consumerpedia has posted a helpful response and explanation on their blog. To clarify: It's for anything reviewable, not just products. And I didn't mean to imply that it's a wiki.

It'll be crucial to see how they implement their karma system. And, I'm still unclear about the basic question of how it handles multiple reviews of a single item.